


Pumpkin Cravings

by cassowarykisses



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Planet, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pre-Moirallegiance, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 23:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12119568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassowarykisses/pseuds/cassowarykisses
Summary: Joey's been having trouble finding food to eat since she landed on Alternia. Xefros decides to cook her something.





	Pumpkin Cravings

**Author's Note:**

> Pumpkin Cravings is a song from Homestuck Volume 5! If you're coming here from Hiveswap and aren't familiar with the Homestuck soundtracks, check them out - they've got a lot of really remarkable music.

Finding Alternian food that Joey can eat is a bit of an adventure.

Trolls like their snack food live and crawling and their meals slurried or slimed, all of which horrifies Joey. Xefros tries to explain that the exoskeletons give it a kick, but she won’t even bite down on a single wriggling flavorgrub. Something about it being cruel? Xefros isn’t sure. The concept of cruelty as a bad thing, rather than the prerogative of the higher castes, is still new to him.

For the time being, this means Xefros is eating better than he ever has, since Joey is giving him all of her food. It’s fun (for him), but it’s not sustainable. It’s only been a day or so, but she’ll get hungry eventually. Xefros has been hungry before, usually when the Heiress’s pool parties get to the orbital bombardment phase and the local foodspawn sellhive gets blown up. Joey says that she’s been hungry before too, when her babysitter has been busy with work for a couple days and can’t go to the grocery store.

Neither of them are keen on repeating the experience.

Fortunately, they’re at a safe hive now. Tetrarch Dammek had always told Xefros that the network of rebellion safe hives would come in handy someday, and he was right! The Tetrarch generally is. Joey rolls her weird white alien eyes when Xefros tells her this, proof that Dammek isn’t the jerk she thinks he is. She says something about how _people_ can be _right_ , but that doesn’t make them the _right people_.

Secretly, Xefros isn’t entirely sure that Dammek is the right person for him anymore. But he has to be the right person for Joey, because he’s the only person who can know who she is.

So this is how Xefros has found himself in their safe hive’s meal block. He doesn’t particularly like to cook, but he’s okay at it. Better than okay, really, because Tetrarch Dammek demands perfection in his favorite foods. It’s just Xefros’s favorite comfort foods that he stumbles over. That’s okay, though, because he needs something for Joey now, not him.

Xefros searches the kitchen for a grubslurry device. There’s one tucked up in a corner cabinet, away from most of the food block traffic. It doesn’t look like it sees a lot of use, but it’s easy enough to pop a couple of chargegrubs in it and switch it on experimentally.

At least his butler preparations are coming in handy. They’re familiar, comforting in a way that the Tetrarch would absolutely not approve of. Xefros doesn’t want everything to be a rebellion. Sometimes, it’s just useful to know his way around a kitchen. He may be a useless rustblood (or he might not be?) but he can do this one thing.

“What are you doing?” Joey asks, peering in from the doorway. There’s a window in the food block, and she’s been instructed to keep away from them, in case the drones come calling. That’s not very likely out here in the country, but there’s no use taking chances. Tetrarch Dammek would probably be horrified to see her here, even. Xefros draws the curtains, but that wouldn’t pass one of the Tetrarch’s operation security tests. For his part, Xefros is mostly just glad to see her up and about. He’d like to get her input.

“I’m, um, cooking,” he says. He gestures to the counter where the grubslurrier sits. “I was thinking I could make grubloaf for you.” He hurries to continue when Joey’s face starts to look horrified. “No, no, it’s good. It’s got grains and stuff in it.” He’s not entirely sure what typical human food looks like. Their pet treats look like lusus treats, but he’s mostly working off of the couple words human and troll culinary vocabulary have in common.

“Can I just … eat the grains?” Joey asks. Her nose is all scrunched up. Xefros thinks her skin is different from his. It’s a lot thinner and more flexible, and she can pull all sorts of weird faces that he can’t. It’s kind of gross, but also pretty cool. Aliens are pretty cool in general, he’s finding out.

“Plain?” Xefros asks. Scratch that, aliens are weird. “Don’t you need the protein?”

Joey snorts. “For what, my exoskeleton?” She pauses. “Wait, don’t tell me you guys actually have one of those.”

“Only when we’re grubs,” Xefros hastens to explain. “Then we pupate, and our bones grow in on the inside.”

“Oh,” Joey says, looking a little wide-eyed. She leans across the threshold of the door and pokes Xefros in the arm. “Humans just grow their bones inside from the beginning, like a sensible species.” She smiles, sweet and soft, and it’s no wonder the grub exoskeletons bothered her. Her teeth aren’t nearly sharp enough to crunch them up.

“Okay,” Xefros says. “Um. One grain pile, coming up.”

Joey giggles. “You can add other things to it, dummy,” she says. “Like. Uh. Do trolls eat lusus milk? Or eggs?”

Xefros looks at her like she’s grown a second head. Wait, that might actually be part of the alien lifecycle. He’ll have to ask her. “Not together!” he exclaims. “Lusus milk is for lususes. Trolls can drink it, but it’s not good for us. And everyone eats cluckbeast eggs.”

“Humans can drink it just fine,” Joey says. “What we do back home,” she says, chancing a step into the food block proper, “is blend up the grain with milk and eat it with fried eggs. We don’t have cluckbeast eggs at home, they’re usually chickens. Or pigeons, if Jude’s birds are laying.”

“Wow,” Xefros says. It’s … pretty much all he can think to say. Aliens are _weird_.

“C’mon,” Joey says, walking over to the thermal hull and pulling it open. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Maybe you should go back to the inside?” Xefros suggests. He doesn’t want to be bossy. Tetrarch Dammek never has this problem.

Joey looks at the drawn curtains, and then back to Xefros. She looks concerned. “Do you think it’ll be a problem?” she asks.

Xefros hesitates. He doesn’t want to scare her with stories about rogue subjuggalators. “I think I’d like to cook for you,” he offers instead. It’s even true. Cooking for Dammek had always been a bonding experience.

Joey nods. “Alright,” she says. “But take this for the eggs.” She presses a bottle of spices into his hand. “My babysitter uses this all the time. It’ll make the food taste like home.” The smile she gives him is a little watery. She might not miss her lusus, Xefros realizes, but there’s no reason she can’t miss a babysitter. Or a brother. He still doesn’t get what those words mean, but he guesses it’s like missing a moirail.

(He doesn’t think about how missing Dammek feels scary but freeing at the same time.)

“Alright,” Xefros says, and gives her a tentative and toothy smile of his own as he turns to get the food ready. When he’s done, Joey claps her hands and proclaims it edible. She also proclaims it oatmeal, which Xefros thinks sounds almost like a proper troll word. She tells him all about Earth food, which ranges from the acceptable (meatloaf) to the completely unacceptable (pumpkin pie, which Joey claims to love).

He tells Joey she can have her weird alien food and he can have his normal alien food, which makes her laugh. They’re aliens to each other, but they don’t have to be.

(He sneaks a bite of the oatmeal when she’s not looking. It’s surprisingly good.)


End file.
